A Dying World
by the stargate time traveller
Summary: As humanity leaves Earth, Murphy reflects on the possibility if Earth is really dead, or if the planet will recover.


Disclaimer - I don't own 'Interstellar'.

Feedback - feel free, but please tell me how you think I've done.

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A Dying World.

As the last of the ships left Earth, Murph had a great view of the massive cylindrical craft which were the saviours of the Human race and she felt a positive feeling of pride in her work. Doctor Brand might have let them all down by giving them false hope without even thinking through the other possibilities, but thanks to her father Murph had managed to find a way around the problem and now the human race and nearly every animal close to humanity was now being taken in the ships where they would have a chance to grow as a people.

The ships would become O'Neil colonies which would make them small cylindrical planets that would be enough to sustain humanity while they travelled through the Solar System, mining asteroids and moons for minerals to expand and to build more colonies while each cylinder sent up from Earth would donate enough plant-life to develop their life-support mechanisms, but the colonies were not a permanent solution. What if something went wrong with the sun?

Murph was not worried about that. She knew the move from Earth into space would give humanity more opportunities to grow and there were already plans to study the wormhole that was on their literal doorstep. Maybe some of the colony ships would be sent out through the wormhole where they would find themselves on the other side, in some other part of the universe, and find one of the planets near Gargantuan and colonise one of those while back in their home solar system some bright spark would find a way of warping space.

Murphy looked out of the window, adjusting the polarisation to filter some of the sunlight so it wouldn't blind her, lost in thought.

It had taken her seven years to get to this point. Seven long years of hard work and convincing the UN of the validity of her work and how she had managed to solve the gravity equation even though Brand had thought he had solved it and discovered no-one could be saved from extinction which was why he had planned on just sending a few embryos to a distant planet where they would probably have no knowledge of Earth barring being taught about it in the equivalent of a textbook, but that was simply because he hadn't thought about whatever her father had done to solve the equation.

Her eyes crinkled as she thought about that weird experience at the farm, how her watch hands had begun moving with a Morse code message, reminding her of those times before her father had left Earth to travel through the wormhole to find out what had happened to the astronauts who had travelled through it, those freak occurrences which could not be the increasingly deteriorating weather conditions of Earth.

The idea of time travel was something she'd expect to find in a HG Wells novel or a _Star Trek_ movie, not in real life but the bizarre nature of the temporal paradox where her father would go off into space through a wormhole, only to encounter the strong time dilation effects of a black hole only for something to happen which would be strong enough to send messages back into the past could not be argued against since Murph had experienced it for herself.

Thinking of her father…. It was hard for Murphy. For a long time…. too long, in fact, she had spat and walked out whenever her father was mentioned because he had gone off to NASA and left her and her brother behind.

Like her, it didn't take long for Tom to develop a kind of animosity towards their father, especially because he had just left them in the care of their beloved grandfather, who became more of a parental figure than he ever was.

She remembered Tom's bitterness only too well, but things between her and her brother had definitely improved. The last seven years had stretched the resources of Earth while many of the farmers wanted to remain behind, refusing to leave their livelihoods though there was little chance of their crops growing successfully in a soil which was increasingly breaking down.

But Tom had relented for the sake of his family, and besides onboard the space colonies he and his family would have a chance to live and to grow.

It just wouldn't be how it was on Earth.

Earth.

Murphy sighed as she looked out of the window again, this time focusing not on the planet below rather than the ships.

Everyone believed Earth was dead, but looking down on the planet which was still glowing blue, bright with water which meant it was still bright with life, it was hard to see it. But humanity no longer belonged on Earth anymore, not since human civilisation had caused so much damage to the planet over the centuries. Crop blights and dust swarms of incredible strength had threatened humanity's survival.

The Blight still garnered speculation to this day. Many people believed the Blight was a man-made disaster than something natural, so there was a lot of desire to make sure outbreaks did not occur on the colony ships. Things like GMOs and monoculture farming were now a thing of the past since it had taken a large amount of work to save as more fauna and flora as they could. There were ships loaded down with forests, flowers, grasses, and animals like the last tigers, elephants, rhinos, and ocean-going animals like whales where it was hoped they would be allowed to survive. It was all they could do after everything humanity had done, though Murphy knew whales were highly intelligent and were sentient. If they felt resentment, she would not be surprised.

Murphy looked sadly down at the Earth. While the planet's current inhabitants were leaving, Murphy had no doubt the planet would recover. When she had been a child she had read Michael Crichton's, _Jurassic Park_. She had read the small chapter where an Ian Malcolm who had more time in the novel than in the movie and a more greedy John Hammond who had only built the park for financial gain, had debated about what could destroy the Earth.

Malcolm had told Hammond despite being injured after that mess with the, T. rex and dosed up on morphine to ease him through the pain, the dinosaurs genetically engineered to be the park' s showpiece would not be capable of destroying the planet. Sure, they might kill a few people, destroy a few houses if they could, but they wouldn't be able to destroy the planet; a child of four could work that out!

Palaeontology was not her forte, but Murphy knew enough about dinosaurs to know that unlike humans the dinosaurs did not screw up the planet; they just lumbered about the Earth, eating quietly, not playing with technology or causing deforestation or wiping out entire species out of greed, but going about their lives.

But Michael Crichton's novel had made it clear in that part the Earth could take care of itself. Malcolm had told Hammond in the book that even if there was an accident, like more UV life got through the atmosphere and looked like on the surface, or there was a terrifying nuclear disaster, there would likely be life elsewhere on the planet, trapped in the soil, or in arctic ice, or down in the depths of the sea. Somehow, after millions of years of evolution, life and nature would find a way to survive.

As she looked down at the surface of the planet, Murphy wondered if Earth would recover from this one considering what had happened, but maybe in millions of years time when humanity had established itself elsewhere, life would have found a way.

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Until the next one-shot.


End file.
